Links for 2015-02-13

Butterfield insists that Slack improves on the basic messaging functionality offered by its predecessors. The company plans to expand from 100 employees to 250 this year, open an office in Dublin, and launch a version that supports large companies with multiple teams.

A tool for managing Apache Kafka. It supports the following : Manage multiple clusters; Easy inspection of cluster state (topics, brokers, replica distribution, partition distribution); Run preferred replica election; Generate partition assignments (based on current state of cluster); Run reassignment of partition (based on generated assignments)

Vaurien is basically a Chaos Monkey for your TCP connections. Vaurien acts as a proxy between your application and any backend. You can use it in your functional tests or even on a real deployment through the command-line. Vaurien is a TCP proxy that simply reads data sent to it and pass it to a backend, and vice-versa. It has built-in protocols: TCP, HTTP, Redis & Memcache. The TCP protocol is the default one and just sucks data on both sides and pass it along. Having higher-level protocols is mandatory in some cases, when Vaurien needs to read a specific amount of data in the sockets, or when you need to be aware of the kind of response you’re waiting for, and so on. Vaurien also has behaviors. A behavior is a class that’s going to be invoked everytime Vaurien proxies a request. That’s how you can impact the behavior of the proxy. For instance, adding a delay or degrading the response can be implemented in a behavior. Both protocols and behaviors are plugins, allowing you to extend Vaurien by adding new ones. Last (but not least), Vaurien provides a couple of APIs you can use to change the behavior of the proxy live. That’s handy when you are doing functional tests against your server: you can for instance start to add big delays and see how your web application reacts.

‘If it works, a copy of Burgertime for DOS is now in your browser, clickable from my entry. If it doesn’t… well, no Burgertime for you. (Unless you visit the page.) There’s a “share this” link in the new archive.org interface for sharing these in-browser emulations in web pages, weblogs and who knows what else.’

According to a report posted Thursday to the website of the state-run China Youth Daily, the Cyberspace Administration of China choral group this week unveiled a new song, “Cyberspace Spirit,” glorifying the cleanliness and clarity of China’s uniquely managed Internet. The song, an orchestral march built around a chorus that proclaims China’s ambition to become an “Internet power,” opens with lyrics describing celestial bodies keeping careful watch over the sky. From there, the lyrics conjure more vivid imagery, comparing the Internet to “a beam of incorruptible sunlight” that unites “the powers of life from all creation.”